The Currency of Youth and the Grief of Unlearning
Content Warning: This essay discusses sexual coercion, grooming, and non-consensual sexual encounters involving age and power imbalances. Please take care of yourself while reading.
A man is sitting across from me. He is 45. I am 21. We are sharing a blanket for an evening picnic in a park, in a city I don't live in anymore. He has already poured me a second glass of sauvignon blanc I didn't ask for. He is telling me I'm unlike anyone he's met, that most people my age don't have a single interesting thought in their head, that he can already tell I'm different.
I am drinking in his compliments the way I am drinking the wine that appears to never end in my glass.
I don't know exactly when it happened, but I remember catching his eye when I took my sunglasses off as the sun began to set. Me looking at him was all he needed…
Continued…
It happened so fast. I don’t even really know when. I caught his eye; the way he looked at me, I couldn’t fully understand. What was he thinking? What did he want?
Suddenly I felt his tongue on mine.
I barely had a second to register what was happening. In the moment, it wasn't fear I had felt, but maybe more disoriented by the escalation. It was like the actions were moving faster than my brain could comprehend. I don’t think it really clicked until I felt my back hit the ground. Did he pin me down? I thought to myself.
When he paused, I sat up. It took me a second to catch my bearings — place, time, like what just happened?
When I came to, I could see him as he sat back down; his face had the expression as if he was struggling to restrain himself. As if he’s not in control. But at the time I didn’t realise he was the only one in control.
I want to say I didn't want it, or that I didn’t like it, or that I just left him right then and there. But at the time I thought I was feeling exhilaration. This man works in finance, is well off, owns his own home in the city, and is wining and dining me at one of the nicest parks in the city at sunset. I felt special. I felt sexy. I felt desired. I didn't want to lose that feeling.
At the time, I didn’t realise that the adrenaline I was feeling was actually tied to a fear response. That the disorienting, unexpected hypersexualisation turned nonconsensual domineering of me would leave me with this rush. I rushed; I now thought maybe I wanted it or maybe that's what I am supposed to do for a man like this. I mean, I didn’t get much time to consider my options, to consent to the action, and acknowledge whether I wanted this feeling, but it was there; he took control, and I thought I must want it. Right?
When I came to, it wasn’t only him I noticed and was observing. I saw people around us staring. I caught their looks. I could see from their expression that they were seeing me, as the 21-year-old queer lad I was, pinned under a 45-year-old man in a public park. But it wasn’t him they were assessing, no, not him; everyone looked at me. Not with concern — but as if they knew me, as if they knew why, as if they'd already decided whose fault this was.
I was suddenly and viscerally aware of their perception. I was young, in a new city, studying at uni, and figuring out who I was, how I wanted to present, and what perceptions I hoped that would give. But I looked at myself and realised I chose a button-down cheetah print top, waistband of my underwear visible on my hips, paired with jean shorts, and likely smelling of a fragrance from an Abercrombie & Fitch store.
Now, I am aware that there is nothing wrong with the outfit I chose or the style I was playing with- nor does this define me or invite others to make assessments of me or decisions for me. But I could see all around the park that it was not a concern anyone expressed but judgement. It’s as if they screamed “whore” at me but didn’t even have to say the words for me to know. I felt a sense of fear and shame from everyone around me, and it was a perfect recipe for him to keep giving me compliments, topping up the wine, and wanting someone to like me in a situation I felt was out of my control.
An hour later we are in a cab. I don't remember agreeing to go. He said we were going back to his place for a better drink. I nodded. I remember his hand was in my pants before I registered it had left his lap, and I remember thinking, distantly, like I was watching it from the ceiling: how did we get here? Not what does this mean. Not do I want this. Just: how did A become Z without my noticing the alphabet in between?
That night turned morning. I woke up and was far from a hangover and still very much drunk. It’s weird when you wake up feeling the same way you went to sleep, as if no time had passed in between. But I had remembered every moment of the night before. I mean, even if I hadn’t remembered, I could feel every act that was done to, on, and in my body. I remember those moments.
I want to tell you I said no. I want to tell you I said yes, too, and meant it. I wish I could say I had said anything because then I could feel like I at least expressed agency. But there wasn’t a yes, no, scream, cry, or protest from me. The truth sits somewhere I still don't have language for.
And I think the lack of that language is the whole problem with this story and every story like it.
The years that built the silence
From the time I was a teenager entering queer spaces to my mid-twenties, I existed within a very specific economy. The currency was youth. The buyers were men no less than a decade older than me, some more than three. It didn't matter how confident I felt some days, or how little I understood myself on others. It didn't matter my job, my bank account, whether I had abs or didn't.
What mattered, what always mattered, was that I was young in rooms full of men who had stopped being young a long time ago and had found a way to keep feeding on it anyway.
I internalised it fast, the way you internalise anything that's the only feedback loop available to you. The way I dressed, the way I moved through a room, who I searched for on apps and why; all of it narrowed until it fit the shape of what older men wanted. And when that attention dried up for a stretch, when I couldn't figure out why the messages slowed, or the eye contact across a room stopped landing, I didn't think, Good, I'm free of it. I thought, what's wrong with me now? That's the part that still catches in my throat. I grieved the loss of being wanted by men who were using that wanting as a leash.
I have daddy issues. I am aware. I can say that plainly now, at 29, in a way I couldn't at 22.
And because I have daddy issues, the attention of older men felt like evidence: finally, someone qualified is telling me I'm worth something. I don't know that I've undone that wiring. I can't sit here and tell you I feel nothing when an older man's eyes catch mine across a room today. Even now, when looking on apps and Instagram, I find my eyes drifting to older men, drifting back to a time when the way they saw me, accepted me, desired me, wanted me, felt like it mattered to my own sense of self.
The awareness I've built over the last few years lives right next to the trauma, and some days I can't tell which one is speaking.
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The pattern, on repeat
Here is the pattern, roughly, because it repeated enough times that it stopped feeling like an event and started feeling like a genre:
drinks, always drinks…
maybe dinner (but rarely, and I know why)
a man old enough to be settled in a way I found magnetic precisely because I was not settled in anything
a little more wine, then more wine, and more, suddenly losing track of what you're drinking, how much or whether you even ordered it
compliments dressed up as flattery and flattery dressed up as intimacy: you're so unlike anyone I've met, I can't help myself, what do you even call someone like you.
and then comes a slow erosion of the space between his hand and my body, timed so precisely to the alcohol effect that by the time I noticed it happening, noticing felt beside the point.
I want to be exact about this because vagueness is what let it keep happening: I cannot always say I didn't want it. I can say that every time I wasn't present for the decision. I fell into it. That's the verb that comes up over and over in my memory of those years—fell. Like gravity. Like something that happens to you rather than something you do.
People have told me, not unkindly, that since I probably would have wanted it eventually, there's no real harm done. And maybe there's truth folded in there somewhere. I could have said no in a lot of those rooms, and I think nothing terrible would have happened to me for saying it. But I also think if I had said no, some of those men would have kept going a beat longer than they should have, would have needed a second no, a third, delivered with a firmness I did not have access to at 18, 19, 20 years old with my third drink in hand and a man twice my age telling me I was special.
Some of what happened to me in those years meets, plainly, the definition of assault.
Some of it lives in a much blurrier place; a place built specifically to be blurry, because blurriness is what lets a 45-year-old man tell himself, and everyone else, that nothing happened that wasn't wanted.
When your consent is negotiated through a haze of alcohol, flattery, and a decade of conditioning that told you desirability equals worth, the no you might have said gets quieter and quieter until it isn't a no at all, just a silence that gets read as permission.
That's not an accident. That's the design. That is the patriarchal system that says a man’s wants and desires are worth more and at the expense of others.
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Twenty-nine, and the floor falling out
Here is the moment the floor actually fell out from under all of it, and it wasn't a court case or a confrontation or an apology. It was ordinary.
I was at a bar, and a 19-year-old struck up a conversation with me, clearly interested, clearly hoping something might happen.
And I felt—nothing. Not flattered, not tempted, not even briefly curious. I felt like I was looking at a kid. Not because he was unattractive, unintelligent, or uninteresting. Because I could see, instantly and without effort, everything he hadn't lived yet. The heartbreaks he hadn't had. The version of himself he was still trying on. I thought about all the ways I could have used what I have now—the ease, the settledness, the ability to make a 19-year-old feel like the most interesting person in the room—and the thought made my stomach turn.
That's when I understood, all the way down, what had actually been done to me. Because if I can't imagine doing to a 19-year-old what was done to me at that age, then the men who did it to me were never confused about the gap. They knew exactly how young I was. They knew exactly what they were doing with that knowledge.
"Age is just a number" is a phrase built for men who need eighteen to function as a permission slip, as if a person crosses some threshold on their birthday and arrives fully formed, brain finished, heart calloused enough to metabolise being used by someone three decades their senior.
It isn't true. I know it isn't true because I am the person who was supposed to have crossed that threshold, and I can look back at myself at 18, 20, 22, 24, and see, with total clarity, a person who did not yet know themself well enough to navigate these experiences.
Unlearning half a life
I don't know how you collapse a framework you built your entire adult identity around, especially when collapsing it means admitting how much of your youth you spent being used by people who told you they were the ones giving you something.
I am still inside that collapse.
I don't think there's a clean floor on the other side of it, just a longer hallway.
Part of what makes this so disorienting, for queer people specifically, is that we don't get the timeline everyone else does. Straight, cisgender kids generally get to do their growing up, their fumbling, their identity experiments, alongside people their own age in dorms, in first jobs, in the ordinary chaos of leaving home. Queer people, a lot of us, don't find our people until later, and by the time we go looking, we're not looking among peers. We're looking among elders, because that's who built the spaces that exist.
Now there is no denying the real value in these spaces; I've had mentors, older queer people who showed me things about my own life I couldn't have found on my own, and I don't want to erase that or pretend every cross-generational relationship in queer community is corrosive. It isn't. Thinking it is allows it to continue in the background that you pretend to not see or hear when the music is blasting, the dance floor is shaking, and the alcohol or drugs make everything lighter.
But some of those elders take the exact moment we are most unformed, most hungry for guidance, most willing to mistake attention for love, and use it. And when you name that, the answer you get back, again and again, is some version of: their youth was stolen too; this is just how they get it back.
I don't have an answer for how someone whose youth was taken away from them should go about processing that trauma. But how does someone decide the way to heal is to take someone else's?
Our community is traumatised and understandably so, but when we talk about the intergenerational trauma that is passed amongst familial dynamics, we also need to apply this framework to community dynamics. We have to want better for the future generations of our community. We cannot use our trauma to recreate more trauma. At what cost? At what end?
I am not the person with an answer to every single question raised; I only have the questions, and I've been sitting with them for a long time now, and it hasn't gotten any easier to hold.
If this essay brought something up for you, you deserve support that isn't a stranger's essay. RAINN's National Sexual Assault Hotline (1-800-656-4673, online.rainn.org) offers confidential support in the US, and organisations like Rape Crisis in the UK or Aotearoa New Zealand’s Safe to Talk (0800 044 334) offer similar resources elsewhere. You don't have to carry this alone.
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